THE PLACE OF MUSIC IN A LIBERAL 
EDUCATION. 
ADDRESS TO SECTION L (EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE) BY 
Sin HENRY HADOW, C.B.E., D.Mus., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
Some years ago we were sitting round the fire in an Oxford Common 
Room. ‘The Dean, who had the evening paper, let his eye fall upon 
a paragraph of musical criticism, and read it aloud in that tone of 
_ polished irony which we all knew to be his accustomed mark of 
_ disapproval. It was a harmless paragraph and contained somewhere 
an innocent technicality—I think ‘sub-mediant.’ When he had 
finished, he looked across to the eminent scholar by the fireside and 
said, ‘Of course, you know what a ‘‘ sub-mediant’’ is?’ To which 
came the answer, slow, meditating and pious, ‘ God forbid! ’ 
That is fairly typical of the attitude adopted in those days by 
scholarhip and literary culture toward the sister art. There were, 
no doubt, at Oxford and elsewhere, some notable exceptions, but in 
general the erudite world of England regarded music as something 
outside the scholar’s province: something to be enjoyed as a recreation 
or a pastime, something even to be encouraged with generous rewards 
and good-humoured praise, as the Squire might dismiss the mummers 
on Christmas Eve; but as far as any sympathy or insight was con- 
cerned there had been very little progress since the time when, as Byron 
says,— 
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: 
‘John Bull, with ready hand, 
Applauds the strain he cannot understand.’ 
Applause, no doubt, as much as you will—artists live on applause— 
but as for understanding or even supposing that there was anything 
to be understood— God forbid ! ’ 
Two other remarkable pieces of evidence may be adduced from 
more recent years. The Home University Library, issued by an 
enterprising publisher and controlled by a body of very distinguished 
editors, set out to supply a series of monographs on all subjects in 
which an intelligent reader could take an interest ; science, history, 
poetry, politics, foreign travel—all were to be included, nothing human 
was to be alien from it. When, at the completion of the hundredth 
-yolume, it was pointed out that there had been no book on Music 
_ or on any subject in which Music could enter, the reply was that this 
omission was intentional for fear there should be no readers. Music 
was not regarded as one among the hundred subjects most likely to 
engage a reader’s attention. There is a similar omission from the 
~ Cambridge History of Literature, that monumental work—ere 
yerennius—which has become indispensable to every scholar of our 
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